You’re a Mean One, Mrs. Grinch
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24
The only thing Jesse wanted for Christmas was a nude photo of Sasha as the Grinch, so Sasha was writhing in a virtual thatch of green fur generated by her iPhone, naked in an empty claw-foot bathtub, her right thumb hovering at the ready over the camera button and her back arching pornographically, her left calf draped over the edge of the tub and her right toe crooked skyward with balletic aspiration. She was a busty Jewess masquerading as a lissome green creature, which was probably why she couldn’t get the picture right, no matter how artfully she twisted. When her face looked hot, her tits came out lumpy, and when her body looked acceptably supple, the filter distorted her facial features into a mess of plush green fur and digitized eyelashes.
It was thankless work. Sasha grunted in frustration each time another terrible photo appeared in her camera roll. But she contorted anew, refocused the phone on her face (now visibly strained with determination), and humbled herself before the technology of the day—which everyone else used for purposes mundane and mercenary, but which Sasha was using for the highest purpose: that of seduction. The Grinch filter jumped to life in holographic patches.
Sasha and her iPhone wrestled for control of the image. Cotton-candy plumes of lime-green hair haloed her pink cheeks, swaying as she twisted her neck. Her nose blunted into an Anglo-Saxon snub dyed a shade deeper than the rest of her silky swirls of facial fur. It was the kind of nose she’d so often wished for growing up, but she saw now that it was all wrong on her face—a snub nose made her look asshole-ish, elitist. Glittering, bitter emerald irises ringed beefed-up black pupils, darting furtively in a milky bath of computer-generated sclera. Tangled green bushes replaced Sasha’s own dutifully threaded eyebrows. She smiled to reveal long, mossy teeth.
Besides the buttery eyelashes fanning the cartoon-princess eyes, it would be crazy to call this monstrous face “feminine.” But somehow the effect was beautiful in its hallucinatory sway. It produced an image that was visionary rather than literal, a trancey interpretation of what “woman” might mean in a blurry sense. Mediated by the Grinch filter, Sasha’s face was steely, its aspirational wickedness intercepting a darling, doe-eyed innocence. She pursed her scaly lips, cocked her furry jaw.
She looked really hot. It made sense that Jesse was horny for the Grinch. She—the Grinch—was a villain, a minx. The story of the Grinch was ultimately the tale of a cunt with a growth mindset. It was the story of a heart that could—and would!—swell to three times its size by the story’s end. Jesse was horny for the Grinch’s bitchiness, but also horny for the Grinch’s redemption. Yes, her boyfriend was horny for the Grinch’s peregrination.
She typed the words come back to me in white font, massaged the text down to its tiniest possible size, and implanted it, subliminally, in the gleam of the Grinch’s pupil. I want to be better for you, pleaded the big emerald eye. Inspired by her own virtue, Sasha contorted herself into the acrobatic shape of an exotic frog, making sure her ankles—her two best features—glistened daintily.
The bathroom was flooded with the soft light of a custom-made feat of industrial lamp design. Gays hated overhead lighting; Jules, their host and the house’s owner, had let the original ceiling fixture dust over, taped down the light switches. It was certainly possible that under fluorescent bulbs, the green of Sasha’s fur would not have shimmered so.
Jesse’s interest in the Grinch had something to do with the color green. Jesse had recently given her a green-and-pink Vivienne Westwood orb necklace for their one-year anniversary, along with a limited-edition Kylie Jenner eyeliner (called “Kyliner” and accompanied by a glossy note from Kylie herself) in Grinch green. All of the kitchen tools back in Jesse’s Brooklyn apartment were green: cheese grater, knife, teakettle. Most of the furniture, too, including a Realtree camouflage love seat that Jesse had upholstered that fall. Green succulents on the coffee table and a huge metal cactus with prickles to hang their keys and Sasha’s headscarves. Green bottles of vermouth on the bar cart and green-and-white vintage YSL towels in the bathroom, which Jesse had got from working on a set. And, for the holidays, three tiny green stockings on the defunct fireplace, each embroidered in Jesse’s hand with a different initial: S. for Sasha, J. for Jesse, and V. for Vivienne, Sasha’s black pug. And Sasha always wore a bootleg green Chanel ribbon around her neck or in her hair, its tendrils curling around her shoulders or between her collarbones. Today the ribbon sat in a loose knot around her neck. On her phone screen, the ribbon flashed in and out of the frame, the filter unsure how to Grinchify it.
Sasha stretched out her legs and arms in the bathtub and let her phone rest on her stomach. Vivienne, who had been sleeping on the plush bath mat, lifted her head to lick Sasha’s dangling wrist, and Sasha massaged Vivienne’s shiny forehead. The blood rushed through her vascular highway, her heart pounding out an uncertain rhythm. She put one leg on either side of the tub, like the woman in her favorite birthing video. This was unsexy of her, to flash herself at the ceiling. But her Grinch face had unlocked a feral rush. She imagined eleven tiny green pups suckling at her green teats while Jesse waited anxiously at her side, peering from time to time to see if a tendriled green head was emerging yet from her furry green crotch.
Jesse was in the bedroom next door to the bathroom, on the phone with Faye the psychotherapist. Though it was their first afternoon in Hudson, and technically they were on vacation, Jesse had forgotten to cancel before Faye’s forty-eight-hour cancellation window, so she’d excused herself from the rest of the group for the fifty-minute phone session to avoid paying Faye’s cancellation fee. Sasha’s phone read 3:23, meaning that half an hour of Jesse’s therapeutic hour remained.
She aimed the phone at her tits with newfound motivation. The filter’s touch was less artistic with the body than it had been with the face. The color it cast over Sasha’s flesh was nauseating, the nipples sprouting pathetic tufts of kelly-green fur. Jesse would think bristly nipples were hot, so she snapped a half-hearted picture, but the image on the screen horrified her, and she deleted it quickly.
Copyright © 2023 by Jenny Fran Davis
